Most consumer marketers don’t know what to track when running a digital marketing campaign. If you are asking the question, what data should I track… you are further ahead than many. Smart marketers are just starting to ask this question.

Think back to the last digital marketing campaign you worked on.

1. Did you have a plan for which data to track?

2. Did you have a consistent way of storing data collected?

3. When planning the campaign, did you use metrics from past campaigns to budget and forecast accurately?

If you are like most digital marketing agencies and brand managers, you answered “no” to the questions above. But you’re probably also thinking that it would be nice to have:

A process that told you which data to track from your digital marketing campaigns (to make your life easier),

An easy way to store that data (so you don’t have to bother with it later), and

An easier way to plan campaigns and make great data-driven marketing decisions in the future (aka Digital Marketing Intelligence or DMI).

DMI, when leveraged properly, informs digital marketing decision making using a data-driven approach. Rome wasn’t built in a day, however. Reaching the point where your data can quickly and easily tell you everything you need to know takes a lot of planning. Here at Qoints, we’ve separated DMI proficiency into 4 levels; this is the first of a series of articles where we dig deeper into the defining characteristics of each level, and provide some pointers for reaching the next level.

Marketing campaigns are more often planned around a combination of best practices, gut feelings, art direction and budget availability, rather than historical data or industry benchmarks

Do any of these sound familiar? If so, don’t fret; the only way to go is up. Here are some tips to help get you to Level 2 and beyond:

Standardize digital marketing data across all of your company’s campaigns

When collecting digital marketing data (whether through a contest, coupon, sample, or any other kind of promotion), always store the same data points under a common format. For example, store gender data as “Male” rather than “M,” “Man,” or “m.” It sounds trivial, but when you amass data across many campaigns over time, standardization of data variables makes it a lot easier to benchmark by ensuring an apples to apples comparison.

Standardize KPIs and which metrics get tracked and reported

Every campaign has its own specific objective. But campaigns with differing objectives can still work together to provide context for an ongoing definition of success. Standardizing common metrics such as page visits, contest signups, Facebook shares, and coupon redemptions that occur in some or all other campaigns helps to make this possible. If the underlying data is standardized, and the brand managers know ahead of time which information must be collected and stored, then you’ll be able to generate more useful key performance indicator (KPI) benchmarks from them. Not only that, but your KPI benchmarks will be more reliable because they are generated by a larger and more recent sample size of campaigns (even if the mechanics and objectives of each campaign are slightly different).

Storing your digital marketing data in a standardized way can require a lot of new processes and planning if you are starting from scratch to develop your own methods and tools. Brand managers at first will likely be reluctant to adopt yet another set of steps to go through for each campaign, but in the end it will save them time, make reporting easier, help them plan future campaigns more efficiently, and make their clients happier through better, more contextual data-driven reporting.

TORONTO – February 13, 2015 — Qoints Inc. is happy to announce that it has been selected as one of 12 companies to pitch as part of the live showcase for start-ups during the 2015 Canadian Crowdfunding Summit on Tuesday March 3, 2015. The summit is the first crowdfunding conference of its kind in Canada and is attracting entrepreneurs, investors, SMEs and leaders in the crowdfunding industry from Canada and abroad. This is a great opportunity for to spread the word further among the investment community, while standing alongside some of Toronto’s most promising start-ups.

“Crowdfunding has come a long way in just a few short years,” states Cory Rosenfield, CEO of Qoints Inc. “As we’ve seen in so many industries, advances in technology and cultural shifts are providing new opportunities to change the way that business is done. We’re proud to have been selected to present our business at this inaugural event.”

About Qoints Inc

Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Qoints is a collaborative repository for digital marketing data; it allows marketers to monitor the success of their campaigns against their competition in real time and gain actionable intelligence from the data they collect. The insights and predictions Qoints generates are used by brand marketers (and their agencies) to justify tactical decisions before, during and after a campaign and get maximum ROI from a marketing budget. Using a democratized approach to performance benchmarking and data warehousing, Qoints delivers a simple, data-driven solution that provides digital marketers with the competitive intelligence they need to create the most effective promotions for their target audiences.

About the National Crowdfunding Association of Canada

The National Crowdfunding Association of Canada (NCFA Canada) is a cross-Canada crowdfunding hub providing education, advocacy and networking opportunities in the rapidly evolving crowdfunding industry. NCFA Canada is a community-based, membership-driven entity that was formed at the grass roots level to fill a national need in the market place. Join our growing network of industry stakeholders, fundraisers and investors. Increase your organization’s profile and gain access to a dynamic group of industry front runners.

How Smart Are Your Marketing Reports? The Value of Digital Marketing Benchmarking

Mature media channels have industry benchmarks like JD Power and Nielsen, but digital marketers have yet to catch up to this level of benchmarking and industry-wide comparison. Most brands and digital marketing agencies are only operating with a low level of Digital Marketing Intelligence (DMI). Consequently, when these brands and agencies report on their digital marketing campaigns, the reports lack context and insight.

Even though we now live in the age of Big Data, most digital agencies and brands are operating in the lower levels of DMI. The good news is that all it takes is a bit of commitment to start working your way up the ladder. This week’s format may look familiar as we’re sticking to the theme of DMI levels, but today the focus is solely on reporting (an essential part of any marketing endeavour).

DMI Level 1: Simple, One-Off Reports

Marketing agency life is hectic and brand clients move fast. Campaign after campaign must get out the door as quickly as possible, with barely any time to evaluate before you’re behind on the next project. Every campaign has some kind of data tracking going on. After all, there’s Facebook Insights, LinkedIn Ads reporting and all sorts of dashboards that automatically store data as a campaign runs. But most digital marketing data isn’t planned and catalogued well, nor is it standardized from one campaign to the next. Your brand manager is focused on getting things into market, and isn’t proactively planning how they will capture and organize the data that the campaign generates.

When it’s time for a meeting or a month-end report, numbers are pulled and sent. They may be the same KPIs as last time, they may not be. Does this sound familiar? Have you ever looked at a digital marketing report and wondered, “What does this actually mean?” Is $2.50 in media budget per contest entry a good rate? Is a 7% entry conversion rate for our contest page high or low for our industry? How does this cost per click compare to the last campaign? How many visitors did we have last month without the contest vs. this month with the promotion running?

DMI Level 2: Standardized Reporting

If your digital marketing reports seem a little thin and uninformative, then you’re not alone. But life gets better at Level 2. Digital agencies and brands at this level have implemented standards in their digital marketing reporting. They have a plan and a process for tracking digital marketing campaigns, and it shows in their reports.

For example, a digital marketing report that is operating at DMI Level 2 will tell you all the same KPIs as last month’s report did. This seems like it should be standard practice but surprisingly, many clients do not demand it and many agencies do not make streamlined KPIs a priority unless it is demanded.

Brands and agencies at DMI Level 2 have standardized format for their digital marketing metrics and KPIs, so they are able to pull historical comparisons. This sets the stage for moving on up to DMI Level 3.

DMI Level 3: Reporting with Insights – Internal Benchmarking

In order to reach DMI Level 3, digital marketing campaign reports have to be giving you actionable insights. They have to tell you how your KPIs and ROI compare to other campaigns. In an agency, this might even include reporting in comparison to other brands within the agency (anonymously, of course). This level of detail is needed in order to stimulate intelligent discussion around future tactics and strategy.

For example: it’s good to know the media cost per entrant for this month’s sweepstakes, but it’s much more valuable if you also know that this month’s media cost per entrant was 10% more expensive than last year’s sweepstakes, but still below the average of all similar sweepstakes that you’ve run over the last 3 years. It’s one thing to know the redemption rate of a coupon, but what if you also knew the redemption rates of similar coupons run in the past and how the current coupon stacks up to the historical average?

This kind of information is referred to as internal benchmarking, and it’s a very powerful and valuable capability. Imagine if you knew that offering a coupon with a value of $1.50 would garner 95% of the redemptions that a coupon with a $2.00 value would – you could save thousands of dollars! This is the value of operating at DMI Level 3.

DMI Level 4: Reporting with Context – Industry Benchmarking

As the digital marketing industry matures, we’ll see more and more agencies and brands demanding standardized reporting with insights; the payoff is simply too great to be ignored. But the most forward-thinking brand marketers will be operating at DMI Level 4: industry benchmarking. At this level, digital marketing intelligence is derived from industry data across many brands and agencies through a collaborative opt-in model. Only this level of competitive benchmarking can give you the true context of how your digital marketing campaigns are performing. When competitive benchmarking is used as a forecasting and planning tool, your brand has an advantage that puts it head and shoulders above the rest… well ahead of even the ones operating at a solid DMI Level 3.

Qoints was designed to help brand marketers move up this ladder quickly and set them up for continued digital success. Learn more about what Qoints does or contact us to set up a demo and find out how easy it is to start benchmarking today!

Marketing Mag’s featured article of the day last Wednesday made us smile because it essentially repeats what we’ve been saying for the last year: marketers aren’t even getting close to as much value from their data as they could be. Why is that? They don’t know how.

Deloitte Canada presented the study at last week’s Advertising and Marketing Week conference, which “showed that 82% of more than 300 surveyed CMOs have been asked to interpret consumer analytics data and admitted that they felt unqualified to do so based on previous experience.”

“Marketers [overwhelmingly] believe (71 per cent) that harnessing data analytics is one of the most important challenges they face. Two-thirds (66 per cent) of marketers use analytics in making key decisions related to marketing. However, half of respondents (51 per cent) do not have the in-house skills to harness data and 44 per cent also do not rely on agencies for support with data analytics.”

“This is an exciting time for the marketing industry. With the role of the marketer evolving it is necessary for the marketer-agency relationship to progress as well,” said Colleen Albiston, Chief Marketing Officer, Deloitte. “From our research there are clear gaps that marketers cannot fill in-house, and they will look to agencies for this support. Agencies have an important opportunity here that they shouldn’t pass up.”

Digital marketing is challenging most CMOs because their job is to take the information they’re given and plan their strategies around it. But the volume and diversity of data that is now available from marketing campaigns is pushing the limits of their data analysis skills. This is part of what’s been driving the trend we’ve been observing for years of marketing being a fundamental driver of investment in IT and related tech services.

It’s not entirely their fault. In the past, CMOs have not generally been hired for their data modelling abilities – other skills have been prioritized. Developing algorithms to break down oodles of data into easily-understood insights, or even overseeing the creation of such algorithms, simply falls outside of the skillsets of most CMOs. Marketing abilities have mainly been evaluated by perceived performance in past roles, which has always been difficult to quantify objectively with traditional marketing methods such as radio, print and television.

We’re the type of geeks that are needed to build such models. The geekiest kind, in fact.

The Qoints Digital Marketing Intelligence (DMI) tool puts marketers in full control of their data by removing the daunting task of interpreting it. Companies send us their data, and we send it back to them in a useable format which includes an industry benchmark so they can see how their efforts compare to their competitors’.

That benchmark is the real game changer, because a major part of the problem that CMOs face is the difficulty of contextualizing the results of their digital marketing efforts across the board. Today, when a CMO is asked by stakeholders to provide some reasoning behind a reported 2% bump in sales, delivering a quantifiable response is essentially impossible without impeccable data management from before the start of the time period being examined. With Qoints DMI, answering such a question with confidence becomes much easier, and it’s backed up with the industry’s first-ever neutral repository of digital promotion data to quantify any claims made.

Like we said up top, this is nothing new to us which is why we’re smiling. But not as brightly as our current clients. Drop us a line and we’ll tell you who they are. You’ve heard of them.

This post is the first in a series of articles exploring the 4 levels of DMI and how organizations can improve their data-driven marketing efforts to move up the DMI ladder.

Digital Marketing Intelligence (DMI) is the ability to derive actionable insight from the data you collect. Executed properly, a DMI strategy supports a marketing campaign in the planning phase, during execution, and following completion as planning for the next campaign begins.

Introducing Digital Marketing Intelligence

Most companies create streams of customer and performance data, but have no way of pulling it all together to make any kind of data-driven decisions. Only 15% of marketers are actually using data to guide their decision making. The conditions that have led to this environment are generally a combination of the following:

Data pours in from too many disparate sources

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are not well defined, relevant, or measurable

Product and brand managers aren’t data scientists, and they don’t have the time to pore over tons of disconnected information effectively

These aren’t excuses. They’re realities. Here’s another reality for you: if you’re not contextualizing your data into one cohesive story, you’re wasting your money collecting it. Data can show you so much if you know where and how to look at it, so there’s no reason to let it go to waste

To help understand DMI and how it relates to your overall marketing success and ROI, we’ve broken down the journey to best-of-breed DMI into four levels. Let’s look at the four levels now, and consider where your company stands.

Level 1 – Hello, 2005

Most brands, agencies and organizations are uncomfortably at Level 1 — I say uncomfortably because while they’ve been collecting data since the early days of Web 2.0 (because they knew they should), they feel like they’ve been wasting their time and money.

Worse, they’re frequently wasting their clients’ and stakeholders’ time with it. They’ve been trotting out the same uncontextualized plans and reports at presentations, and hoping they’re not asked to go into greater detail. They’re pleased when they can report that their efforts resulted in a 2% drop in cost per acquisition for example, but have no idea why or how it happened, or what they can do to boost it to 3% or even more.

Level 1 organizations aren’t just missing the big picture — they don’t even know it’s there to be seen. It’s an archaic way of doing business and a huge opportunity missed for better understanding the results of an in-market campaign and planning for greater success in future ones.

Level 2 – Want context. Can’t get context.

A DMI Level 2 organization is miles ahead of Level 1 in that they’re deliberately tracking and cataloguing certain KPIs. Their challenges are in how to standardize their reporting and figuring out how to draw useful insights from their marketing data. They recognize the value of their data, but are struggling with how to get contextual insights without investing way too many hours into data analysis.

Level 2 is when many organizations start working with us because we take care of the data warehousing and analysis for them. No matter where the data comes from, we collect it, break it down, run it through our algorithmic filters and send it back as an easy-to-read report.

Level 3 – Better, Stronger, Faster!

Level 3 is exciting because your DMI muscle is working overtime. You’re like a blind man who can suddenly see. And with DMI benchmarks on your side, there’s a lot to see.

Brands at DMI Level 3 are at an advantage because they have found a way standardize their marketing campaign data and leverage that data for actionable insights. This isn’t an easy feat, but the rewards are

better marketing campaign planning,

more accurate forecasting of campaign effectiveness and budget requirements, and

real-time optimization of marketing campaigns.

The type of questions that a brand at DMI Level 3 is asking are things that marketers at Levels 1 and 2 can only dream of. Level 3 brands are being guided by the data they’ve been collecting all along. It’s no longer about the numbers — it’s about the story that the numbers tell.

What king of costest has generated more entries per media dollar spent in our target demographic, instant win or grand prize sweepstakes?

Which media channels have been the most effective at reaching our target audience in our last 5 promotions?

What was the average conversion rate for our last 3 online coupon offers?

At Level 3 you’re making data-guided decisions as opposed to data-driven guesses. You can defend any move you make with hard data, and you can answer any question a client or stakeholder has, often before they even think to ask it.

A brand that is operating at DMI Level 3 will be able to leverage insights based on their own past campaign performance for factors such as CONTEST CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION metrics. The advantage over other agencies and brands who do not have this kind of intel is clear.

Level 4 – Jedi Knight. Philosopher King. Mac Daddy of Metrics.

There’s one more level in the evolution of digital marketing intelligence capabilities: competitive benchmarking. Internal benchmarking of digital marketing campaigns shows you where you stand against your own historic performance and is a massive advantage. But seeing your campaigns in the context of industry-wide benchmarks is a whole new level of empowerment.

At DMI Level 4, you’re at the leading edge. You’re using your data not just as an evaluator but also as a forecaster. Your reports and insights are comprehensive and well thought out. And your meetings last half as long because you’re impossible to argue with.

Conclusion

As digital marketers move toward easier and more effective ways of understanding the effects of what they do, there are challenges all along the way. The benefits of being able to get more digital marketing intelligence are clear no matter where you stand today. So,

how do you track and store your digital marketing data?

what are you doing to make sense of it?

how are you learning from past digital marketing campaigns?

how will your next one be better?

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If you’re at Level 4, we’re right there with you. We’re working on new solutions every day and have some pretty mind-blowing ideas in development. Stay tuned for details and if you find yourself at the low end of this scale, there’s no time like the present to begin setting yourself up for data-driven success.

The online world moves fast. Digital marketing as a whole has been around in one form or another for almost 20 years, since the dawn of the commercial internet; it’s not new. But technology and culture continue to change so rapidly that “Internet Marketing” means something new about every 18 months. If you’re not deeply involved in our industry you probably feel like it’s all brand new, all the time. As we’ve written previously, marketers know they must reinvent themselves in order to adapt to the ever-changing marketing landscape.

As former professional Internet marketers, we’ve spend a lot of time educating clients. Radio marketers, for example, don’t face the same challenge. Radio marketing has been around for generations. We all understand what it does and how it works, even if we don’t fully understand the technology behind it.

Even as we venture into 2015, there are still many companies who view digital marketing as something new and risky. Rather than working on integrated cross-channel marketing campaigns, opportunities are left on the table because they still view digital marketing as an alternative to traditional marketing, not as a complement. Or, they think of the Internet as a threat to their business because they don’t fully “get it,” which leaves their competitors to leapfrog them and own the vast online space uncontested.

Digital marketing has inherent advantages over traditional media marketing. Here are the major ones to consider if you are taking the first step into the world of digital marketing, or trying to work more digital strategies into your overall marketing effort.

Digital Marketing Is Cost-Effective

Digital marketing can be more cost-effective than traditional tactics for several reasons. First, it’s not as resource-intensive as other forms of media. We don’t have to print a magazine and ship it, or rent a blimp, or wrap a streetcar in custom vinyl artwork. I’m not saying that other types of advertising don’t have a place – they most certainly do. But on a cost per impression basis, it’s hard to match the cost effectiveness of good digital marketing that is timely, on-brand and targeted properly. Which brings me to the second point…

Digital Marketing Offers Very Accurate Targeting

Using today’s popular digital advertising platforms, the degree to which ads can be targeted is staggering. We don’t have to advertise to an entire city or region at once the way TV and radio require. We can target ads to a specific group with digital advertising, based on physical location (even a 1km radius!), the device a person is using (iPhones only, or laptops), certain times of day, days of the week, age, gender, interests, job titles, and more. Much more.

All this targeting capability means that we only have to pay to reach the right people at the right time, and we can be selective about who we target in much more powerful ways than traditional media channels can possibly allow.

Digital Marketing Comes With Data

As we touched on in a previous post, digital marketing allows us to collect a wealth of data on who we are reaching and how these people are reacting to our messages. There are many forms of traditional advertising that also allow data to be collected, such as coupon redemption, or using different phone numbers in different ads to track which print ads are working and where. But digital advertising comes with a flood of data that is infinitely more detailed.

The challenge with digital marketing data is how to catalogue this data properly, and how to use it to your advantage. It has never been easier for companies to understand the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, but most brands and agencies are only starting to adopt the tools and processes necessary for driving real Data Marketing Intelligence (link to DMI post) from their digital campaigns.

Traditional marketing isn’t about to disappear anytime soon because, well, it’s traditional. That being said, marketing budgets have been steadily migrating to the digital side, and Qoints is on the forefront of that revolution. Over the next several weeks, we will be delving deeper into setting your digital campaigns up to perform optimally. Be sure to review the blog posts linked in this article, and the others available in the Blog section of the Qoints website for more advice.

2014 Highlights

2014 was a big year for Qoints. We’re grateful for all the help, encouragement, hype, and enthusiasm we’ve received from the brands, marketers, investors, advisors and friends in our network. Looking back on how far we’ve come in these 12 short months makes us realize the importance of surrounding ourselves with great people.

We started the year with a product demo and a dream. Since then, the Qoints team has doubled in size, raised initial funding, created a strong early network of data partners, and gained solid exposure online (35,000 Twitter followers!) as well as in the real world through event appearances and speaking engagements. We have initiated major brand and agency pilots, and are working towards our US patent application around our revolutionary insights engine!

Looking towards 2015

2015 will be even bigger. We are on the verge of launching a beta self-service portal to allow brand marketers to easily add promotional engagement data into the system on their own, and generate marketing intelligence in the form of KPI benchmarks against our database of actual brand marketing performance data.

We’re also rolling out an API for our data partners. This will allow for a real-time data feed between us and them, meaning the benchmarks our customers see will be constantly updating and actually reflect the current state of the audience that is being targeted.

As we expand our group of data partners, we’re also building a window into the world of sales performance data. The natural consequence of good marketing is increased sales, which makes this a logical next step. Benchmarking for marketing becomes even more valuable when sales data can be taken into account (especially in real-time), making this functionality a major aspect of our 2015 roadmap.

Also on the horizon is Qoints’ expansion into additional industry verticals. Given the momentum we are seeing with the consumer packaged goods, automotive and the retail sectors, our ambition is to not only continue to service those buckets, but also to provide global benchmarks and actionable insights for others. At the moment, we have banking/finance, pharmaceutical, gaming, and media/entertainment on our radar. We are also growing the breadth of our dataset and insights beyond promotions to include search engine marketing, email marketing, SEO, public relations, and newer social channels. The sky’s the limit when you start to put big marketing data under the microscope.

2015 will see the continued expansion of our distribution, whether it be working with new agencies, new brands, publishing partners or researchers. This goes hand-in-hand with increased thought leadership through our growing network of publishers, industry blogs and major publications. You’ll also be seeing more of us at conferences as we strive to further educate brand marketers on the importance of benchmarking the performance of their digital promotions.

As a growing startup, fundraising will also be a priority this year. In 2014 we purposely kept things in the family, but since then, we have developed a significant pipeline of new sales opportunities and it’s time to put gasoline on the fire! Qoints is actively raising additional capital beyond the pre-seed funding that was raised in 2014. This will mainly support key hires in engineering, data science and sales roles.

Happy New Year!

Again, looking over this post makes me realize the power of being connected with the right people. So, thank you to all of you who’ve influenced, inspired and connected with us this year, and here’s to a healthy and prosperous 2015 for all!

A Digital Marketers Guide to Social Contest Tracking and Reporting

Are you tracking your social media marketing?

Social media analytics goes a long way to improve ROI and campaign performance

Life as a brand marketer moves pretty fast. There is often pressure to get your campaigns into market very quickly, while juggling multiple projects and deadlines. You wouldn’t be the only brand manager to find out, after running a digital campaign such as a contest promoted through social media, that you missed some key points of data along the way.

The simple act of tracking where your campaign visitors are coming from, and who they are, is a valuable opportunity to improve your campaign results (and your client’s ROI) during the campaign. What’s more, studies have shown that when you benchmark your campaign performance your campaign effectiveness will improve over time. It’s worth investing a little time in campaign analytics.

Suppose you are running a contest online and promoting it through social media marketing. A list of which data to track for a typical contest marketing campaign should include:

Visits to your contest landing page or microsite

The source & medium where these visitors came from

Sign-ups and completions of each step in a multi-step contest submission

Conversion rates overall and for each traffic segment (tackled in a separate post)

In this post, we’ll show you how to use Google Analytics to track not only visits to your contest page (#1) but how to easily set up URLs for the links you use to promote your campaign and track data for visitor sources (#2). In future posts we’ll tackle the rest.

Why track your marketing campaigns?

Obviously your client is going to want to know how many visitors, sign-ups, contest entrants, etc. you achieved with your campaign. You’ll be able to get the total number of contest entries just by pulling the list from the database of your contest app or contest page. Isn’t that enough?

Marketers at the top of their game want more data. If you are tracking where your visitors are coming from and whether or not people from each traffic source are converting on your sign-up page, then you can make on-the-fly improvements to your campaign and get better results overall, rather than just waiting until the contest is over and then looking at the data.

For example, suppose you are running a contest and you’ve promoted the contest through print, email, Facebook Ads, Facebook posts, and Google Adwords. Visitors from these sources will appear in Google Analytics as follows:

Actual Traffic Source without Tracking URLs

How it appears in Google Analytics (source / medium)

Typed URL from print (or scans QR code)

direct / none

Clicked a link in an email

direct / none

Clicked Facebook Ad to landing page

referral / facebook*

Clicked Facebook Post

referral / facebook*

Clicked link to your site in Facebook’s Mobile App

direct / none

Clicked Adwords Ad (banner or text ad)

organic / google

* These can show up as various sources such as m.facebook.com (Facebook’s mobile web page) and l.facebook.com (Facebook’s laptop/desktop version), depending which devices they use and if they are using http or https status.

If you are monitoring the campaign, you won’t be able to tell which visitors came from print versus email. You won’t be able to distinguish which Facebook traffic came from your ads or your posts. And in this example your Google traffic is showing up in Analytics as organic traffic, not paid traffic (cpc), which means it’s indistinguishable from actual organic search visitors.

Is it worth the money you spent on Facebook ads? Or the time you spend engaging on Facebook? Did the Google Adwords spend pay off? Did anyone actually use your print piece to get to your contest online? You just don’t know. Let alone know the effectiveness compared to your past campaigns, or your competition.

But if you could see, for example, part way through the contest that your Facebook Ads were converting at half the cost that visitors from Adwords were, you could divert your Adwords budget into Facebook, thereby getting more sign-ups for your budget. If you could immediately tell that all of the direct traffic was coming from print, you could re-jig your email marketing strategy or messaging and improve traffic from email. Maybe you are emailing to 5 different lists. Wouldn’t it be great if you could see your success rates on a list-by-list basis?

How to track your marketing campaigns?

Google Analytics is the tool of choice for most companies, so we’ll use it as an example here.

Google Analytics tracks page views and user sessions (aka visits) by default, but can also be used to track events such as video views, partial web form fills and more. But the list of key data points above can be tracked simply by adding parameters to your landing page URLs.

When a visitor comes to your web page, Google Analytics records that pageview along with a ton of data, most importantly for our purposes Analytics tracks the source and medium of that visitor. The “source” is the domain that the visitor came from, and the “medium” is a classification for different kinds of traffic. There is also a “campaign” parameter that can be used to further segment your traffic.

Many tools like MailChimp and Hubspot have features that let you create tracking URLs, but anyone can use Google’s own Tracking URL Builder here.

These UTM parameters (everything after the ‘?’) force Google Analytics to write this data into the visitor’s pageview. So, when I look in Analytics under Acquisition > All Traffic, I will see any traffic from the above Tracking URL as:

source / medium = newsletter / email

and in my Acquisition > Campaigns report I will see this traffic under

Campaign = agency-newsletter

Using Tracking URLs for the campaign promo example above, we’d get this:

Actual Traffic Source with Tracking URLs

How it appears in Google Analytics (source / medium)

Typed URL from print (or scans QR code)

mailer / print

Clicked a link in an email

contest-promo / email

Clicked Facebook Ad to landing page

facebook / cpc

Clicked Facebook Post*

facebook / referral

Clicked Adwords Ad (banner or text ad)**

google / cpc

* using a simple URL when posting links to Facebook will report people who click the link as facebook / referral by default, but you can use UTM parameters to distinguish different campaigns if you want

Things to remember

Standardize your campaign parameters

Google Analytics simply records whatever it’s told. So plan your tracking parameters in advance and keep them organized. Best practice is to use a standard set of parameters company-wide. If you and your team you use a different set of parameters every time an email goes out, you won’t be able to easily report on fun things like traffic growth from email month-over-month. Analytics is case-sensitive, too. “Email”, “email”, “e-mail” and “E-mail” will report as four separate media!

Keep track of the URLs you’ve created, so that the correct one can be used for each purpose. If you accidentally post this URL (http://qoints.com/?utm_source=contest-promo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=agencies) to Facebook, visitors clicking that link will actually report as having come from your contest promo email even though they’ve come from Facebook.

Use parameters in unique combinations

You may be tempted to use unique parameters for all of the variables for each source, but keep it simple. As long as each traffic source has it’s own unique combination of parameters you’ll be able to report on it separately.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

Source

Medium

Campaign

google

cpc

ground-hog-day

bing

cpc

ground-hog-day

facebook

cpc

ground-hog-day

facebook

social-blog-share

ground-hog-day

twitter

social-blog-share

ground-hog-day

partners-list

email

ground-hog-day

members-list

email

ground-hog-day

These parameters let me report on all paid traffic, or all email traffic, or all traffic from the whole ground-hog-day campaign as well as reporting on each one separately.

Start now

Remember, any data is better than none. Start simple and go from there. Being able to moderate your campaign strategy in response to real-time analytics data is a powerful way to drive stronger ROI for your campaigns. Here at Qoints we’ve proven the value of benchmarking against other campaigns, and tracking is the vital first step.

It’s incredible how much digital marketing data is recorded yet completely ignored!

Figuring out how to use marketing engagement data to make smarter decisions is one of the biggest challenges facing digital brand marketers today.

According to a CMO study, enterprise marketers said they spend 8% of their marketing budgets on marketing analytics (in 2012), and expect a 60% increase to this budget by 2015. How do you plan to monetize that budget shift?

Qoints is working to turn that (sometimes messy) engagement data into adaptive digital marketing intelligence!

The Data Driven Marketing Institute commisioned a study suggesting that the Data Driven Marketing Economy (DDME) added over $156 billion to the US economy (along with 675,000 jobs ) in 2012 alone.

Marketers want to make smarter decisions!

Digital marketing data can be valuable in a vacuum, but it’s even more useful as part of a larger set… and we’re always looking to grow our portfolio of trusted data partners. The following outlines how Qoints works with partners to drive monetary value from campaign data and further global performance benchmarking.

When you benchmark your marketing campaigns using Qoints’ comparative index, you’re backing up tactical decisions with concrete evidence from similar campaigns that target the same audience. At the same time, you’re helping to further the Qoints dataset for yourself and for other marketers to benefit from. But brand marketers are not the only way that we keep our dataset relevant and fresh – we rely on a growing number of data partners that are growing the size and breadth of the Qoints index exponentially faster than the brand marketers who are already involved in our pilot program.

How do we thank our data partners for their role in making digital marketers smarter?

We help them make their end customers smarter.

The majority of our data partners are promotion automation, brand marketing tools and digital agencies. Any company with a relevant dataset is eligible, but those ones fit our mold better than others because of the vast amount of engagement they tend to record around digital promotions such as contests, coupons and samples. In exchange for campaign engagement activity (excluding any personally identifiable information), Qoints enables marketers to optimize their campaign strategy and performance in real time to get maximum ROI on their marketing dollars.

For data partners, the value proposition is similar. In exchange for the data, we provide a powerful set of services that help show your end customer get the most out of your particular service:

We’ll centralize each customer’s digital marketing data and scrub it for ease of comparison

We’ll compare your numbers against industry averages across a range of KPIs and against market trends so you know where you and your clients stand today

We’ll identify KPIs you may not have considered or thought were possible to ascertain from your data

We’ll use your numbers to identify growth opportunities for you and your clients and tell you how to take advantage of them online

We’ll help you make money with the data you collect with reports and tools you can mark up and sell to your customers.

Even more importantly, we’ll deliver this all as an easy-to-present case study to distribute to your stakeholders.

Best of all, you’ll see Qoints in action.

You’ll see your digital performance from a different perspective, and quite possibly the one that matters most: how it compares to your competitive segment.

Before A Campaign

You’ll use our data to validate or reject tactics for upcoming campaigns based on your customers’ goals.

You’ll watch it predict campaign results before launch.

During A Campaign

You’ll get ideas for tweaking under-performing digital assets and media spends in real time while running a campaign.

You’ll learn how to optimize every minute of a campaign with benchmarks that continually adapt as more data flows in.

You’ll be better at choosing digital channels and negotiating with them because you’ll know more about what your data is worth to them.

If you’re a mass-market data collector, this is a no-brainer. You have no up-front cost, and come out wiser about your clients’ businesses with added value to offer. You can even mark up the service as an additional revenue stream.

Rest assured, we won’t use your digital marketing data in any way other than as part of an aggregate, and personally identifiable data is never stored.

If you’re interested, fill out the contact form below or drop us a line at info@qoints.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

5 Factors That Will Help You Get A Good Conversion Rate On Your Contest

There are a number of factors that will impact a digital promotions conversion rate. In this post, I will talk about contest conversion rates specifically. Keep in mind however, the general principles outlined can be related to coupons, samples, loyalty, email, content and other types of digital promotions.

Conversion Rate Optimization 101

No matter how many consumers you reach online with the message to enter your contest, some will drop off the radar during their engagement with the promotion before fully completing the entry process, or converting. When thinking ahead to the end of your promotion and how many full conversions you’d like to have when it’s all said and done, you can build a stronger case for choosing certain tactics over others.

The first consideration is your industry; the same strategies implemented in different industries can have completely opposite results. Once you are analyzing only promotions that have occurred in your industry, use following list of the most important factors that should be looked at in order to come up with a conversion rate goal for your contest:

Note: In this article I define a conversion as total participants divided by total possible participants (typically unique visitors). I also reference unique conversions as individual (unique) participants divided by total unique visitors. Often, the definition of a conversion rate will vary depending on the promotion objectives. For example: survey completion, email subscriptions, white-paper downloads, event registration, etc. are all possible goals for a promotion that will impact what a good conversion rate looks like.

Promotion Mechanics

The most significant mechanics variable across contests is single entry vs. multiple entry. Multi-entry campaigns generate a lower unique visitor conversion rate because the potential participant needs to make a larger commitment to the campaign (they need to return when allowed to create more entries in order to maximize the chances of winning). For example, when running a multiple entry contest in the retail sector, more than 60% of entrants will participate 3 times or more. This generates a much stronger brand engagement experience for those more committed consumers, but overall these types of promotions have a lower conversion rate when compared to those that only allow for a single entry per user.

Note: One way to increase visits for multi-entry campaigns is through the use of bonus entries – when leveraged effectively, they can both bring participants back and help expose them to other aspects of the campaign or brand.

Another thing to keep in mind is what you are asking users to do in order to qualify – how much effort do potential participants have to put in to complete their entry? As you might expect, the more things you ask a user to do before their entry is completed, the lower you can expect your conversions to be. For example, when adding any kind of content submission requirement such as uploading a photo or writing a sentence or two, the conversion rate drops by approximately 190% in contests that are promoting consumer packaged goods (CPG).

Target Demographic

This may seem like Marketing 101, but it’s important enough to repeat a thousand times: know your target audience (demographics AND region), and select tactics that are proven to work in those groups. Everything else being equal, engagement with contests is relatively similar from region to region. That being said (and without being income-specific), females, people living in more rural areas, students and moms are the groups that are most likely to engage with a contest. In terms of the industries they tend to like, CPG, Retail, Entertainment and Fashion are the sector favourites for this group of consumers.

Prizing

The prize you build your contest around has to be shiny and appealing to the target demographic – if you get this right, you’ll spend less money attracting the people you don’t want. Try to pick something that’s exclusive to your brand and is not easily replicated if you can (high intrinsic value), especially if you’re asking for a little more from your participants than just their name and email address. You’ll also want to ensure the dollar value of the prize is in line with the amount of engagement you’d like to generate, and how much engagement you are asking of the participant. In some industries, you can boost your conversion rate even more by selecting prizes that are appropriate for the season… in all industries, however, the best prizes are the ones that are deeply connected to the actual brand that is sponsoring the contest.

Media Effectiveness

Brand marketers spend a pretty penny on media to generate awareness and drive traffic to the contests they run. Generally, the majority of a budget is spent on paid media as opposed to being spent on the production of the promotion. Before you propose or approve any media budget, make sure you consider which channels are most suitable for reaching your target audience, and of course your campaign mechanics and prizing as detailed above.

These considerations are relevant to the entire campaign, but they warrant special attention on the media buying side since the majority of investment is made there and careless decisions made in media buying have the ability to thwart the entire effort. It’s strongly recommended that you monitor your media buy as it occurs, so you can make adjustments earlier if they’re needed (hopefully resulting in both cost savings and more relevant traffic).

When utilizing real-time analytics and performance monitoring, you have the ability to gain timely insights to help optimize your spend while the promotion is still in market. Again, it may seem obvious but if 50% of visitors that are driven through Facebook Ads convert and only 25% of Paid Search visitors are converting, tweak the spend. Different industries and regions will have varying results for even the same promotion.

Shareability

Media buying is great for building an early base of entries, but a well-conceived contest will drive shares as well (which cost you nothing and generally bring much higher conversion rates than paid media budgets). One thing that helps is an element or the appearance of exclusivity – the duration of the campaign can create the feeling of exclusivity simply through urgency, but stricter entry requirements (ie restricting entries to people residing within a particular region) or highly-targeted prizing increase the shareability of a campaign to an even greater extent.

The best place to prompt the participant to share the promotion is immediately following the completion of their entry; this moment is the greatest point of satisfaction aside from actually winning a prize. This should be accounted for when designing the user experience of the contest. The longer it has been since the entry was made, the less likely a participant is to share it.

In Conclusion

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the factors that affect a promotion’s conversion rate. If you are not currently taking into account one or more of these considerations, it’s certainly worth taking another look at the process you go through before signing off on a campaign and how you monitor it while in market.

Feel free to contact Qoints via email (info@qoints.com) to find out more about how you can use online tools to make this process easier and more effective!